Below the Hill

Tall, slightly crooked, irregular crowns. Leaves glowing green. A darker spruce behind, dense and compact. Beyond them, rooftops and narrow streets. Seablue water. Lake Maggiore. I stand where people once danced naked. The catholic locals called them balabiott. Here on the hill of truth.

Two of them were Ida Hofmann, a pianist and music teacher, and Henri Oedenkoven, son of a wealthy industrialist. They arrived in 1900 with the shared vision that here, on this old vineyard, a freer way of living was possible.

Ida was a feminist, and her thinking was largely influenced by the Lebensreform, the life-reform movement that emerged in the Bourgeoisie in Germany and Switzerland at the dawn of the century as a counteraction to industrialization. In Henri, she had found a spiritual companion who, through years of illness and, as Ida later wrote, a deep moral dissatisfaction with the world, believed in a natural and healthy lifestyle.

It was his father's money that bought the hill.

One day, they gathered around a table in Munich with a small group who all shared the rejection of what life had become. Shortly after, they ventured out together through hills and mountains until they found in Ascona the place to root their project of communal living and social experimenting.

The pressures of these times feel familiar. Relentless growth, imperialist competition, ever-faster communication, and new manufacturing were at their heights.

Beneath the Golden Age that the middle and upper classes were celebrating, the working class was drowning. It was a world of rapid change, and only a matter of time before the anxiety beneath the surface seethed.

Monte Verità was both an escape and a response built for truth seekers, the very belief that gave the mountain its new name.

The truth, however, looks different for everyone.

He was a "peculiar figure," Ida once wrote about Gusto Gräser, one of the co-founders, "not quite suitable for the project." From the beginning, he was merely tolerated.

For Ida and Henri, Monte Verità had always meant a sanatorium: a place to heal, but also a business.

Twelve light-and-air huts and a communal house would form the structure for their concept of free love, naked body culture, vegetarianism, and light-and-air therapy. Those who wanted to stay had to abstain from alcohol, drugs, tobacco; even sugar and salt were strictly forbidden.

Gusto, in contrast, sought radical simplicity and challenged all social norms, including money. In 1901, at the initiative of Ida and Henri, Gusto was expelled from the community he had helped found, and ended up living in a cave below the hill. It is said Hermann Hesse, who spent time on the hill mostly in Gusto's circle, was deeply influenced, personally and in his writing.

Meanwhile, the sanatorium made its name across the Atlantic. In 1903, an American newspaper wrote about the so-called ‘Naturmenschen’, who would become the pioneers of a new way of life.

Artists, dancers, anarchists, and thinkers joined from across Europe and the United States, including Isadora Duncan, Carl Jung, Erich Mühsam and Rudolf Laban.

More than a hundred years later, I am standing in Casa Selma, one of the original huts, now part of a museum. My Instagram feed is full of couples, families or friends buying raw land in southern Europe, building permaculture gardens, living in vans, doing yoga in the sun.

The images have changed, but the longing is the same.

I walk under the trees on the hill and imagine life in the colony: people in long, light dresses, some staying longer than others. Their hair swirls in the wind as they move their naked bodies in the sunlight, expressing their souls in dance.

I think about the religious Ticinese villagers watching this scandalous spectacle from below and wonder what they thought of the wealthy Northern strangers arriving on their land and calling it truth.

There are moments I catch myself at a table having a very similar dream. A kitchen or possibly a bar, friends talking over Gin Tonic or Whiskey Sour. Someone says: Let's buy land, raise our children together, build something real.

I want that. Not abstractly; I grew up in a community, and I experienced what it gives children that two parents alone cannot. But I hesitate for the same reason. I know what it asks.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with a woman who was volunteering at an eco-project in the Greek countryside at the time. The intention was good, she said, but the project feels stuck inside its own ideals. Nobody takes responsibility, and ideologies clash. People come and go, leaving nothing lasting. Despite attempts to reach out, the local community stays skeptical and disconnected. I imagine them watching like the Ticinese from outside.

The Ascona colony lasted twenty years before it was swallowed back into the system it had tried to escape from. Henri's father had withdrawn his financial support. Ida and Henri, by then separated, went together with Henri's new wife and his children to Spain, and later Brazil. The same vision was now called Monte Sol.

Perhaps it is the imagination of what could be that keeps us going.

The eco village in Spain, the yoga retreat in Bali, the healing center in Costa Rica. Are these the Monte Verità of our times?

The questions stay: who gets to escape, who gets excluded, and who carries the cost of someone else's utopia.

I leave Ascona with tangled feelings, still drawn to the story of the search for liberation, a life closer to each other, yet fully aware that before Monte Verità, there was already life here. One that might have evolved differently if Ida and Henri had never arrived — or if they had arrived asking what this place wants to be.